ASU software - pre-pre-release impressions

Roger Luethi collector at hellgate.ch
Wed May 21 09:17:55 CEST 2008


On Tue, 20 May 2008 11:36:30 -0400, Ian Darwin wrote:
> Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>> On Mon, 19 May 2008 10:27:25 -0400 Ian Darwin <ian at darwinsys.com> babbled:
>>> the current version of ASU uses QTopia's input manager, offering what
>>> looks like a predictive style but is  actually doing a dictionary
>> actually - it doesn't - i wrote one from scratch :) the code is ugly - but 
>> it
>> works. 
>
> That's impressive!  And again, I presumed incorrectly. Sorry.
>
>> it does use standard linux dict files though for the dictionary - the
>> one we ship is an abbreviated one with only 5000 words - but they also 
>> have
>> extended frequency counts. have a dig around the illume package files and 
>> see -
>> it's just a text file. :) it also maintains a user dictionary for personal
>> words you added in ~/.e/e/ :) same format.
>>> lookup; I find this very distracting compared to a plain do-what-I-type
>>> keyboard, and would welcome an easy way to turn this off
>
> I'd still very much like to see a way to turn it off, so it works the same 
> for letters as for numbers. It's annoying 90% of the time because most of 
> the person or street names I need to enter into Contacts are not going to 
> be listed.  I promise not to write my next 850-page book on my Neo, so word 
> lookup is of limited use.  I suspect that Contacts, Todo and Calendar is 
> the most common use case for most people, and that writing normal text is 
> the least common for most people.

Predictive style might still be useful for almost everyone if

a) the dictionary used was built from user data and
b) it could be enabled for search input boxes only.

a) may already help because we're likely to enter the same words (names,
towns) repeatedly.

As for b), at least for searching, the word you're trying to enter is bound
to be in a dictionary built from user data.

Roger




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